The Richest Hill on Earth (June and August of 2010)

          In mid-June my wife and I drove from Washington, near the Idaho border, to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and back. The sheng canopy was overhead the entire way, as I expected.

          Both going and coming we passed through Butte, Montana, in some ways the most interesting city of Montana.
          It was settled as a placer mining camp in 1864, and in 1870 its population was 241. In 1875 quartz mining was introduced, which stimulated growth and prosperity, and the 1880 census shows population to have been 3363. Successive censuses show 10,723 in 1890, 30,470 in 1900, and 39,165 in 1910.
          Though the state capitol was (and is) Helena, it was said that the most important political decisions during days of the copper kings were made in Butte. Its population peaked at about 100,000.
          For many years, beginning with the discovery of gold in 1862, mining was the leading industry of Montana. The prospect of finding gold and silver brought in people in the early years, but it was the discovery of rich veins of copper in Anaconda and Butte in 1882 that brought real wealth to the state. By 1900 Butte was producing half of the copper in the United States. Mines were dug beneath most of the city, and the city flourished until 1940, when mining declined and increased use of machinery caused the population to diminish.
          When the big copper deposits were discovered, Butte was given the nickname "The Richest Hill On Earth." By 1955 most of that hill was gone, and the Anaconda Copper Company began pit mining, in what became known as the "Berkeley Pit". When I saw it about 1970, the pit was so deep that you could not even hear the motors of the huge machinery at the bottom.
          The pit eventually engulfed a good part of the old city. My grandparents, mother and uncles had lived there in the 1920's, during the heyday of the city, and Iron Street, where their house had been, was one of the streets which was no more.
          In the late 1970's the pit was closed down, and water began to fill the mammoth hole. The water became extremely toxic, so much so that by the early 1990's any birds which had the bad luck to rest on what had become a toxic lake, were likely not to survive the experience. It is now America's largest Superfund site.
          The larger of the early copper companies in Butte combined into the Amalgamated Copper Mining Company under the ownership of early copper king Marcus Daly, and financiers William Rockefeller, Henry Rogers, and Thomas Lawson. It later changed its name to the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, and in the 1920's had a vir- tual mononopoly of mining in Butte. Anaconda Copper became part of ARCO (Atlantic Richfield Corporation) in 1977, and in 1982 ARCO ceased operations in the Berkeley Pit.
          Other pits have been dug in the area since, but the great days of mining in Butte are (apparently) gone.
          What are not gone are the toxins left from the mining and smelting of the ore. Much arsenic, lead, and sulfur came out into the air and ground from the smelting process. This was so deadly that, as my mother told me, most of the smelting was moved from Butte to Anaconda. It has been estimated that at that time 36 tons of arsenic and 1540 tons of sulfur were released by the Anaconda smelter. Pollution from mine tailings extended 150 miles downriver, almost to Missoula (home of the University of Montana).

          But this is by way of background. The point is that before the "richest hill on earth" was mined away, one of the strongest latent vortices of the earth was present on that hill. The image below is prepared from a contemporary NASA photo taken from above:

Butte city proper is in the lower right corner of the photo. The black area to the left of the city is the toxic lake inside the Berkeley pit, and just below the pit is the suburb of Walkerville. To the left and slightly above the pit is what seems to be a holding area, to prevent runoff from the surrounding hills into the toxic area.
          I have enclosed the area from which the vortex now rises out of the ground by an irregular red circle. When it was still dormant, the points where it touched the surface were irregularly spread around the outside. I was only able access a few of them, but that turned out to be sufficient. When it opened, the results were spectacular, as it was "visible" all the way from my home nearly 400 miles (600 kilometers) away. The only vortex which I had previously observed which was visible from nearly such a distance was the Magaliesberg vortex in South Africa.

          Yesterday (the 10th of August) I passed through Butte again and had opportunity to observe reasonably closely the dynamics of the qi connected with the vortex. Below is a schematic sketch of the qi dynamics of the area:

The solid red at the top represents the massed positive qi which is now around most (if not all) the world: the sheng canopy . The orange below it rep- resents the weaker sheng qi which has gradually been working its way down from above. The dirty green represents the slightly negative qi which forms a layer between the ground and the positive qi. The black represents the ground. The light blue to the left represents the water in the holding reservoir, and the dark blue represents the toxic water in the Berkeley Pit.
          the yellow represents the sheng qi which is swirling up to the surface from below. Note that some of it pools off underground reaching into the two bodies of water. The two yellow lines, angled slightly from the vertical, show the outlines of the vortex swirling up through the atmosphere. These turn to a greater angle as they leave the slightly negative and then enter the slightly positive qi up about cloud level. This change of angle is reminiscent of the phenomenon of light refraction, as light passes from matter of one density into that of another.
          The purple arrow represents negative qi flowing directly downward from above into the center of the vortex.